Update: If you read this post a little while ago, there was an error in the formatting of my notes that messed up this post. Problem is now fixed.

Racism scares me. I don’t mean just the history of and the idea of white supremacy. That deeply concerns me after Christchurch taught us that it can manifest itself in the form of terrorism, because there is great danger in people who feel entitled not getting what they think they deserve. But my fear goes further than that. The very matters of racism can scare me some.

They don’t scare me because I am a white male. I recognize and acknowledge the way my background situated me to think about people, particularly African Americans in a way that implicitly communicated race, rather than geography and economics, as the primary explanations for the reports of crime in the news in Jackson, MS.¹ I recognize the way that two or the four most personally vulnerable events I have ever felt in my life, one time by a cult leader on my college campus and one time in a near mugging, were done by people with brown skin and I have to deal with those feelings in such a way to not allow those individuals and my memories of them to determine my views of African Americans.² While I don’t like the reality of such thoughts in the back of my head, I know such doesn’t make me a racist. Racism comes when we ignore and rationalize away the problem, not when we acknowledge it.

What makes me scared about racism, however, is the way in which many people try to address the pernicious effects of race. Although, me fear isn’t how African Americans try to address matters of race. Due to their experiences, most of them are able to differentiate between degrees of racism. The safest people I have ever felt to talk to about matters of race with is African Americans, in fact. From the conversations I have had and from what I imagine, they appreciate someone being willing to have that conversation with them. One of my highlights from my time in ministry were the few chances I got to be a part of Mission Mississippi, a ministry headed by Neddie Winters that tries to accomplish racial reconciliation through building relationships across racial lines. There was a chapter in the Mississippi Delta, a place where the history of racism has left its deepest mark in social organization even as most of the white supremacist elements have passed or gone underground.³ Relationships were being formed that I regret I did not get the chance to more deeply establish due to personal struggles with my energy level due to my own condition and then my leaving to move to Scotland after only two years.⁴What scares me about racism is about the ways in which white people like me try to address racism.

From my own observations, experiences, and learning, the two most common responses are the white hero and the white denier. The white denier is the one we are more readily familiar with. They come with various degrees and intensities, but they grow readily uncomfortable when discussing matters of race. Bring up social scientific findings, such as how a person with a black sounding name is less likely to be hired than a person with a white sounding name, even after all the qualifications are the same, and they engage in various forms of minimization and diversions. The motivations behind such can be diverse. It can be cloaked racial hostility, but I don’t think, or at least I don’t want to believe, that is the motivation much of the time. Rather, I think there are at least three big other motivations behind minimizing the idea that racism still has a real impact in American life: 1) discomfort in recognizing one’s own privilege, 2) fear of being devalued, and 3) troubles integrating conversations with race with the portrayal of race presented to them the news and their experiences.

The first one is much of what operates behind the rhetoric of “white privilege” and the resistance to the concept. (White) American culture inculcated a sense and value for being a person who works hard, which stems back to the Protestant work ethic that Max Weber. American and Protestants are not the only people who recognize the value of hard work, but it became a driving value during the period of economic and social expansion in European and American history. The result is that hard work was for white people very fruitful in improving one’s position and life. To tell a white person that they are ‘privileged’ isn’t just to say something about race: it is an attack at one of the moral ideals that many white Americans have been inculcated with a sense of. “White privilege” is not intended to deny the role that a person’s hard work contributes to their well-being, but it more so points out how one’s hard work becomes more successful than for others because others are more likely to be negatively judged in virtue of ethnicity. But that isn’t what many white people hear: they hear people denying people’s hard work and industriousness.

The second motivation behind denying and minimizing the realities of racism stems from the social and moral fear people have when they feel they are being labeled with some sort of moral wrong or evil. To be a “racist” is a heinous sin in most of the West, and makes one deemed worthy of derision and contempt. This stems from the fact that our prototypes of racism stem from slavery and Jim Crow laws in the American South along with Jewish Holocaust in Nazi Germany. As a consequence, there is a latent anxiety with being in any way associated with such evils, when the realities of racism that are more prevalent are the forms of more implicit and stereotype judgments, but most people would reject and be horrified by any sense of racist supremacy. And this is not a fear without basis: as with all forms of morality and ethics, they are those aggressive types who will try to use charges of racism to tear others down.⁵

The third motivation is more so the type of problem that we all face when it comes to knowledge, our understandings are situated within the life perspective we have. White people who live in white communities, which largely emerges as a result of economics although race can play a factor in some ways, often have a very limited experience of people with black skin. They may have some distant connections with some African Americans that they know (“I have black ‘friends’.”) but their experience and conversations with them are very limited. Consequently, their understanding about race and ethnicity is more impacted by the correlations they see and witness in the news and media. However, statistics courses often have to warn people “correlation is not causation” because we are biased to think correlations suggest a causal relationship. This is even more likely to happen when we are not consciously aware that our thinking is influenced by the correlations within our life experiences. As a consequence, when you expose white people who have been largely insulated from the experiences of black people, it is hard to square away with what they have “learned.”

In other others, the white denier can be motivated by cultural values, fears rooted in self-protection, and the dissonance that exists when one incorporates information from a different perspective than one is accustomed. Sometimes, hatred can be a motivation for such denialism, but the optimist in me wants to believe that these other factors are a much more prevalent factor. However, I do need to make a note of sober caution and mild fear that the tactics of white denialism can, in the context of racial hostility, lead to the emergence of hatred. So, while the motivations behind the denial of the present realities of racism are complex, and most of the time do not lead to hatred for most people, addressing these conversations about race are important for the long term well being of race relations in the United States.

But this leads me to the problem of the “white hero.” Latent within this is one of the common characteristics that comes with being privileged: the opportunity you feel to come to save the day and then reap the benefits of such an action. To be clear, the problem isn’t trying to help other people, including people of different ethnicity, social classes, etc. The problem is associated with the social status of acting like a “hero” conveys.

One motivating factor for becoming a “white hero” is the issue of white guilt. But I want to be clear how I am using the phrase “white guilt” here before progressing onwards. I am not referring to the way the concept of “white guilt” has been used to explain away all forms of political advocacy that conservatives felt problematic. I want to sift the substantive, emotional content of the concept without feeling like I need to fit my intuitions into a conservative point of view. By “white guilt” I am referring simply to the negative emotions white people feel by association to other white people who committed heinous evils. “White guilt” becomes particularly pronounced the more people talk about the problem of racism in terms of “whiteness.” All of us white people who have some sense of moral conscience will feel at least a twinge of guilt in virtue of this association, although it can be amplified based upon the conversations and political discourse. Insofar as we are allowed to think and recognize with social pressure that this feeling of “guilt” is a very normal and healthy feeling that distances us from evil, but is not intended as a slight on one as a person or because of one’s whiteness, white guilt can be a very pro-social emotion that motivate us towards empathy towards those people who by association and due to history have borne the consequences of evil done by white people.

The problem comes in, however, when we don’t respond to such white guilt well. For the white denier, this can lead to an attempt to protect oneself from moral incrimination, as already discussed. This tendency can intensify if one consciously or unconsciously feels any sort of negative feeling towards a minority ethnicity, particularly black people. The combination of white guilt and the (sub)conscious awareness of negative thoughts can lead to a cascade emotional guilt and a personal need to “protect” or “purge” oneself from this feeling of moral guilt.

However, in many cases, rather than being a white denier, being a white hero can also be a way of not adequately addressing the feelings of white guilt. This can lead to some of the political characterizations that have existed around the concept of “white guilt,” but again, I don’t want to try to say all the conservative understanding of “white guilt” is accurate. Principally, I want to avoid that because this feeling of associational guilt can lead people to very helpful responses to the problem of racism and that can lead them to advocate for some “progressive” or “liberal” causes, even if they are politically conservative.⁶ But, I would suggest more often than not, this form of response isn’t that of the “white hero.”

For the white hero, they have a tendency to use their advocacy against racism beyond any sense of compassion for black people from one of two motivations: 1) to compensate for their guilt and 2) to achieve greater status.

When we act to compensate for strong negative emotions, we tend to engage in exaggerated behaviors that would seem far out of proportion to what most people without such a feeling would normally see. So, a person feeling white guilt would be more likely to compensate through a) projecting their own feelings onto people to emotionally purge themselves of this feeling that creates guilt, b) virtue signal how concerned they are about racism, and c) exaggerated attempts to not appear racist. Now a small degree of this would be a bit normal part of the process of dealing with such guilt, but white heroes take this step further. By people heroic in how they fight against racism, that try to purge their own problems through what they do.

However, there is a second, and I would suggest a much more pernicious problem: that of achieving social status through being the white hero. It can be joined to a feeling of white guilt and compensation, but it can also be a manipulation upon a) the idea of being against racism and b) upon the white guilt in other people. I would refer to this type of behavior as a “moral narcissism” in that people exploit certain moral values and feelings for their own gain. However, it is possible that this “moral narcissism” can be part of a person’s own response against their own feelings of white guilt.

In this scenario, a white person actively tears people down other white people for being racist. It is a way in which they can manipulate their own white privilege to speak against racism to benefit themselves, as it is much safer to speak against racism as a white person than as a black person. The severity with which such accusations are made varies, as some people are only mildly motivated by needs for social status whereas others focus almost exclusively on it.

However, beyond the moral negatives that comes with any form of narcissism, it presents two problems in addressing the realities of racism. Firstly, it treats minorities as a tool for the white person to benefit. The status-driven white hero is not concerned about the benefit of the people they supposedly advocate for; they will not remedy the problem of privilege insofar as it is not something people will notice. Rather, they will accumulate more privilege and status for themselves in the name of fighting racism. Secondly, however, these type of people also lead to greater defensiveness in white people to accept the realities of racism, as they have experience the rhetoric of race in such a threatening and hostile manner. It literally feels less safe to think and speak about matters of race.

It is this aspect that creates the most fear about racism for me. Maybe it is my vigilance because I was the victim of a status driven attack on me many years back by a fellow white person (although, it did not address the matter of race, to be clear and fair). But for me, I have found the majority of black people I have talked to about race to be amenable, even if they are direct and express their anger, but I have found in personal experience and in other observations a reason to find the role of the “white hero” to be one of the biggest barriers to racial equality moving forward into the future.

To bring this to a theological conclusion, I find Jesus’ own beatitude of being “poor in spirit” to be a useful way to approach the realities of race and race relations. Now, I don’t want to try to appropriate ethnicity in the phrase “black in spirit” for a whole host of reasons. Nor do I want to make a direct equation with being black and Jesus beatitudes as I think Jesus speaks to poverty for a reason. And I don’t want to foster a sense of dependent attitude as if black people have to rely on white people that the language of poverty can convey. But, just as Jesus never acted the crusading hero of the poor, but rather he lived with and loved them, empathized with and even identifies with their struggles, an attitude by which whites can live with, love, empathize, and identify with some the impacts of racism on African Americans is a healthier way to address the feelings of guilt. However, this takes time and doesn’t come through the strength of one’s actions or one’s arguments. One doesn’t accomplish it by being the white hero or trying to defend yourself from any feeling of guilt, but allow the feelings of associational guilt to motivate one to hear, to listen, to learn, and to grow together.

Of the early Church Father’s that I have found I am in the most agreement with, based upon my limited knowledge of them, I have always been drawn to Irenaeus. His recapitulation theory of the atonement had a profound shaping on my understanding of the atonement during my seminary years and afterward, even if I felt it was a bit overstated. I have also found the concept of the Son and the Spirit as the two Hands of God to be a useful conceptual tool to use in thinking through my research in a Trinitarian epistemology in 1 Corinthians, although I would not turn that into a doctrinal confession. While I have not read all of Adversus Haereses, it is certainly on my radar in the future.

However, I have found one place where I developed my thinking independently of any direct influence from Irenaeus,¹ but have found my thinking reflect is in his preface to Adversus Haereses. Here is how he starts:

Inasmuch as certain men have set the truth aside, and bring in lying words and vain genealogies, which, as the apostle says, “minister questions rather than godly edifying which is in faith,” and by means of their craftily-constructed plausibilities draw away the minds of the inexperienced and take them captive, [I have felt constrained, my dear friend, to compose the following treatise in order to expose and counteract their machinations.] These men falsify the oracles of God, and prove themselves evil interpreters of the good word of revelation. They also overthrow the faith of many, by drawing them away, under a pretence of [superior] knowledge, from Him who rounded and adorned the universe; as if, forsooth, they had something more excellent and sublime to reveal, than that God who created the heaven and the earth, and all things that are therein. By means of specious and plausible words, they cunningly allure the simple-minded to inquire into their system; but they nevertheless clumsily destroy them, while they initiate them into their blasphemous and impious opinions respecting the Demiurge; and these simple ones are unable, even in such a matter, to distinguish falsehood from truth.²

Now, my hope is not to try to commend an attitude of suspicion and vigilance that is demonstrated in Irenaeus’s opening. Much as Barth’s harsh response to Brunner should not be imitated, but understood as part of the challenges of the historical period, I would not commend Irenaeus’s attitude as the general attitude we should take when it comes to defending orthodoxy. Irenaeus was dealing with a specific challenge of his time, and this should be recognized, but we should not let such a theological vilgilance color our general demeanor towards theology. To appropriate the Ecclesiastical proverb: There is a time to be at peace and there is a time to be vigilant.

What, however, I find particularly relevant in Irenaeus’s preface is the role that language and plausibility has in misleading people.

Human thinking and language is a complex phenomenon. However, precisely because it is so complex, our conscious thinking is masked from the various effects our thinking and language can have on us; we can not possibly observe and systematically understand the entire experience of thinking and language. In fact, we are disposed not to because in thinking and language, we are disposed to pay attention to the often implied goal in thought and communication, but not the various other functional effects such thinking and communication can have. We are not even naturally disposed to consider the connections we make from one thought and one statement to the next and consider the chain of reasoning that leads to a specific conclusion.

As a consequence, it becomes easy to smuggle in new ideas within a community without conscious detection. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because there are many ideas that are of great benefit. Nor is the possibility of intellectual challenges from new ideas a problem. Sometimes we have beliefs that have serious blind spots. Rather, the problem comes in, however, when a smuggled idea comes in that legitimates itself as a part of the tradition but then simultaneously creates a contradiction within the traditions of the community; combine this with reputed expertise from the people presenting what is ultimately a contradictory and dissonant idea and you have a recipe for a form of cognitive trickery. However, this can happen with or without anyone’s intention, so it doesn’t mean the people are necessarily malicious or manipulative in intention; it could be that they themselves don’t truly understand the heart of the community but are really more outsiders that think themselves insiders. Nevertheless, while intentions do determine the type of actions people take, they do not determine the actual impact of person’s actions, and as such, there are times to be vigilant about the consequences of certain speech, even if we should chasten any sense of hostility to how we treat such people as persons.

I would suggest this is part of what is happening in Irenaeus’ day. He isn’t dealing with simply new ideas. Nor is he dealing with a critical challenge from the outside that motivates a different type of response. He is addressing a problem of teachers who have set aside certain matters taken to be central truths of the Christian faith, but yet acting as authoritative expositors of this faith. Soon afterward, Irenaeus will use the metaphor of wolves in sheep’s clothing to describe such people because “their language resembles ours, while their sentiments are very different.”³

Now, some people upon hearing such a response might begin to feel their skin crawling, because they themselves have been recipients and victims of people who in their theological hyper-vigilance have attacked and slandered people for things they did not say, reading into ambiguous statements the worst possible consequences and outcomes. This is a very real problem, and why I would suggest we don’t need to simply adopt Irenaeus’ attitude in any sort of unthinking manner when it comes to protecting orthodoxy.

There are multiple ways one can try to protect against heresy, or any other category of unacceptable theology one uses, but they tend to be broken down by the combination of two different frameworks: epistemology and hermeneutics.

In a pure epistemic option, you set from the beginning a system of knowing and knowledge by which you comparing everyone’s reasoning and claims to. This system becomes absolute, in that you assess the basis of the claims based upon how much it conforms to the epistemic framework one works with. This leads to the subjugation of any interpretive work to the epistemic frameworks and cognitive patterns one has established as normative; one’s interpretation is reducible to litmus testing by which one focuses simply on conformity. We can label the pure epistemic option dogmatism, although I say this with the understanding that I am not wanting to direct this towards the historic Christian tradition but to the broader patterns that can be manifested in those who oppose the dogmatism of the historic Christian tradition, such as the way human experience is highlight as a necessary and essential criterion in some forms of progressive theology, or one’s theology becomes guilty of the “heresy” of being “harmful” or “dehumanizing.”⁴

There is another drawback from the pure epistemic option, however, that stems from the practice of litmus testing. What if one’s theology passes all the filters; then it becomes consider safe. You want to know one of the best ways to try to transmit new ideas into the Christian tradition without regards for its impact on the theology: make it sound Trinitarian by using Trinitarian sounding words and phrases. Then, the doctrine can more easily gain acceptance and credence, without consideration for what the true implications of the doctrine are. We see this in social Trinitarianism, where the emphasis is on understanding the persons of the Trinity as persons in our modern language. Theologians like Karl Barth detected concerns with such reasoning and tried to find a different way for describing the ontological status of the Father, Son, and Spirit as “modes of being.” For a hypothetical example, imagine someone a) included into the definition of personhood a sense of inviolable personal autonomy that was used to describe the persons of the Trinity that then b) is used to apply to human persons by application of the Trinity to human relations. What is one consequence of such a theological move? The absolutization of personal choice on all matters, and thus one erodes any sense of community including on ethical matters. But it could seem to have all the hallmarks of Trinitarian doctrine.

The pure epistemic option does something to us: it makes us rather poor and unimaginative interpreters. It reduces interpretation to an act of pattern matching.

However, if we are people who belong to a specific tradition that we think has some truth-bearing properties, it is necessary to some degree that we establish some epistemic framework by which we work with, lest we abandon our traditions as simply a heritage of ideas for us to use and appropriate for whatever purpose whatsoever. What do we do then? We focus more on interpretation and hermeneutics than simply theological knowledge.

Again, allow me to state that I think theological epistemology IS important; my dissertation research is focused on it, albeit from a somewhat different angle than is commonly done in traditional epistemology. But for me, such knowledge presents resources that provide truth, although expressing how they provide truth is not always so simply done, but we never consider ourselves as having come to some system of knowledge that allows us to judge the rightness and wrongness of any and all things apart from the careful consideration and deliberation about the theological claims that are being made. The sins of dogmatism and epistemic certainty isn’t the act of making judgments, but the way judgments are made based upon superficial and stereotyping features that avoid dealing with the complexities contained therein. Dogmatism insulates people with a sensee of ill-conceived confidence that prevents them from engaging with the fullness of what someone is saying or doing, but force fits them within set categories at the beginnings stages of perception and interaction. Dogmatism determines guilt at the investigatory phase, or even before an investigation, rather than allowing judgment to be rendered at a trial.

The intellectual cure for this: a deep appreciation and understanding of how language and thinking function. Language and thinking are complex p processes, and because of this, it can be easy to smuggle in bad ideas, but also because of this, it can also be easy to see bad ideas being smuggled in due to the categorical stereotypes our dogmatism as formed in our own head. A deep understanding of language allows us to see the complex and diverse ways meaning emerges, without having to necessarily prejudge positively or negatively the various possibilities.

The challenge with this cure, however, is the initial uncertainty of it. It means we have to let go of the feeling of certainty and justification that our epistemic dogmatism have created in us and rather allow God to be the one that justifies us and creates us anew.⁵ It means we place our trust first in the wisdom and power of God to lead us and the Church into faithfulness, truth, goodness, and grace and then place our epistemic task as subservient to and formed y that trust, even as our trust in God does not obliterate our responsibility in the epistemic task. It is why I consider the epistemic concept of the warrant as a candidate for knowledge is a useful way to understand our movement towards theological knowledge, without becoming insulated and entrapped within the boundaries of needing absolute justification and certainty.

It is attention to the various hermeneutic possibilities in linguistic and discursive understandings combined with a basic epistemic commitment to the real possibility of moving towards truth, which we see in various forms of critical realism, that allow us to address the complexities and ambiguities that operate in our modern, theological crises created by a post-modernity that has not simply accepted the validity of the diversity in human experience, but insulated knowledge structures emerging from human experience from any and all challenges. So, we now live in an intellectual world that is buzzing with a vast diversity of ideas, conceptualizations, frameworks, etc. that is next to impossible to make meaningful sense apart from the employment of stereotyping if we operate from a position of epistemic dogmatism.

If you look at the patristics, it is commonly an understanding of how language operates that often moves theological development. For instance, reading Gregory Nyssa’s “On ‘Not Three Gods,’” one can see the role this understanding of language works has in defining the problems of calling the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit gods. However, to be clear, his logic does have some defects as William Hasker mentions in Metaphysics & The Tri-Personal God. This probably in part stems from the formalist way that Gregory construes language as a formal system that has a right way of functioning, which is often the consequence of trying to fit language into a specific epistemic framework such as Bertrand Russell’s and many of the positivist’s formalist account of language and proper meaning. Nevertheless, we see here and other places in the patristics that language is a central role of making sense of the account of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Of course, the risk epistemic dogmatism can still exist in virtue of understanding language, one can get caught up into an inflexible metaphysical system that functions as an epistemic framework. William Charlton in Metaphysics and Grammar notes how the emergence of grammatical understanding in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle contributed to the emergence of Western metaphysics; we see a similar pattern in the early Trinitarian debates as the focus on language does lead to the emergence of a metaphysical system that then becomes taken as foundational for later Christian theology. Although, to be clear, I don’t find the problem to be the emergence of metaphysics, but how all thought and language becomes tried by the litmus test of a metaphysical orthodoxy. This perhaps stems from a sense of linguistic prescriptivism that says there is only one right way to speak and all others are considered fundamentally wrong.⁶ Such a strong linguistic prescriptivism can lead to an epistemic dogmatism of metaphysical beliefs. In other words, there seems in my mind a strong correlation between strong linguistic prescriptivism, inflexible metaphysical systems, and epistemic dogmatism.

But to be clear, my critique here is not the place of metaphysics, preference for certain ontological schemas, nor a sense of epistemic understanding that provides truth, but rather how the way a narrow understanding of language and meaning that correlates with inflexibility in metaphysical construal and epistemic dogmatism leads to fundamentally erroneous claims about other people’s thought and language.

One solution is to the acceptance of linguistic diversity as descriptively true, even if it violates our own sense of normativity about language, and make judgments after considerations and deliberations. Yes, it becomes a lot messier and more ambiguous, but I would suggest this is a necessary response in light of the modern age, where the degrees of diversity of thought and language is incalculably complex due to the strong interconnections that have formed with various cultures and identity groups through common informational mediums of the internet. Epistemic dogmatism is not just simply unable to address such a worse of high complexity, but I would contend it fundamentally leads to higher rates of error and falsehood. While a tendency towards epistemic dogmatism was not harmful for an emerging church that had limited political power in the days of Irenaeus or even post-Nicea,⁷ today the protection of orthodoxy through epistemic dogmatism in a period of hyper-diversity can lead to serious errors that can have many negative effects. It is like trying to entrust your physical well-being to someone who knows a book on medicine inside out rather than to a physician that has been entrusted to deal with many of the complexities of the human physiology.

But, it as the point of understanding language that we can address many of the theological challenges that we face in the modern world. And perhaps this is my extolling the virtues of my own choice to think about linguistics, particularly cognitive linguistics, in my personal time and the value I have found in analytic theology to help address various difficult and knotty theological contentions. But, I find in Irenaeus words the most suitable direction for how the Church can deal with the challenges to orthodoxy in our modern world. 

I loathe talking a lot about myself. I don’t mind doing it in the sense of a friendship, but the idea of writing a lot about myself has always seemed a bit of on the narcissistic side. Certainly, there are times to make something known about oneself, such was when one is in need or if you feel other people can benefit from such a personal disclosure, but self-disclosure for me is something that bothers me. And to some degree, if self-disclosures bother you, then you are a normal human being with a sense of humility and propriety. While one should ideally be able to be break through such a discomfort, particularly with people you wish to be close to, it is a good thing to have such inhibition to a degree, I think. In a culture of authentic fakery and manufactured celebrity, a sense of propriety won’t make you the most popular person, but it will prevent you from getting caught in the trap of routine self-absorption that our present culture poisons us while treated it as a healing balm.

The reason why such self-disclosure can be uncomfortable is that we wear masks. We all wear masks, to one degree or another. Sometimes we are doing so manipulatively, sometimes we are doing so innocently, sometimes we are doing so without awareness, but we all wear our masks. No one is a totally open book, if even for the reason that we do not fully understand ourselves. To that end, it is often others who help us to unmask, whether by force, by providing a space to do such, or providing insight. And it is Jesus Christ who I believe will ultimately unmask all the secrets of our hearts in the future eschaton, but with the Spirit occasionally doing such at moments in the present time. 

There are two masks that I have worn in my recent years. Neither of them are morally salacious. Rather they are masks of a different sort.

The first mask is the masking of my pain that has been unmasked in recent months. I have had a lot of pain and suffering in my life. Not so much that I can say my life has been as bad as possible, there have been blessing intermixed within it as I have parents who care about me and financially support me in my studies, a mind when is functioning as it can be is really sharp, and some great opportunities like my present one at the University of St. Andrews. But at the same time, a life of having being bullied, losing a brother to suicide, being forced into sex at one point and then at a later point of life being sexually harassed, and the various struggles with loneliness and isolation of various forms these events have occurred is a lot to carry. And I masked not because I want to project this image of being super strong, but I masked because I did not want other people to be burdened by my burdens; I am all too aware of the pernicious effects of secondary trauma and I much prefer to be careful not to put that onto others.

However, there is another mask I wear. It is the mask I wear about the reason for the journey and direction I have taken in my life. I have masked my calling, and when I say calling, I mean the actually calling and not the thing towards which I am striving towards. While up to this point, various people know bits of my story, no one knows every bit of the story as I have always masked away parts of it. This blog post is my act to unmask this and to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, and let whoever does read this do with it what they will.

My whole life I have always felt different, even in grade school and middle school, I felt different. I acted differently. This was no doubt part of the reason I was picked on so much by the popular kids. If I can define my life my one word it would be “separate”

I was not supposed to be born. I was my mom’s third pregnancy. Her first was my brother Evan. Her second, however, was miscarried. As my mom was reaching later in her 30s, it looked like she would only have one child. But then I came along. I was, in her words, her “miracle baby.” Then, as she told me, she was trying to figure out boy and girl names for her baby, and then one night she had a dream where a lady handed to her a baby and said “His name is Owen.”

But, there were complications late in the pregnancy. My mom had felt me stop moving around for a couple weeks and she was beginning to get worried. She expressed her concern to her doctor, and initially he told her there was nothing to worry about. But then, apparently, he called back later and asked if she wanted to come in and she did. They discovered that I had managed to get my umbilical cord stuck under my arm and I was not getting the oxygen that I had needed. They induced labor, and I was born on May 30, 1984, the day of the last full solar eclipse in North America of the 20th century. 

When I was pretty young, around 3 or 4 years old, my parents, my brother, and I went to the Smokey mountains. One day, we happened upon one spot for my dad to take pictures. My mom was not feeling well that day, so she decided to stay in the car and as my dad, my brother, and I went out to explore. While my dad was taking pictures, I had managed to sneak away and was exploring a fast moving water trench that flowed down a bit into a water mill. My being the adventurous explorer I was, I began to peer into the water in the trench. Meanwhile, back in the car, my mom got a real uneasy feeling and she decided to come out to check on us. As she was approaching she saw me peering over and thought that she needed to hurry over to me. But it was not too much later that I had slipped and fallen into the water trench. As chance would have it, I had on overalls and the strap on my shoulder had gotten caught on a limb hanging over the trench so that I did not get rushed off into the wheel of water mill. However, my head was stuck under water. My mom, seeing this reached for me but the way had made my overalls slippery and I slipped out of her reach. Now, I was not held back by the limb and I start to go down the trench and my mom, in a desperate attempt to get to me before there was no return, manage to grab a hold of me and pull me out. Just like the physician changing his mind to save my life, my mom had a sudden intuition that caused he to act to save my life.

Then, fast foward to my freshman year of college. I had overcome a lot of problems in my life in my primary and secondary education, but I had made it to college and was going looking to trek into the beginnings of adult life. That spring, I went on a leadership retreat with the campus ministry I was going to at the time and while there I had a mental vision that I was going to be a leader of people. (Imagine that! Going to a leadership retreat and thinking you would lead) While I had gone to church since my freshman year of high school and I had a semblance of what I would call repentance and faith during my time in the youth group, it was at that point that I was deeply moved to what I would call a fullest sense of repentance and I first understood what faith as trust in God was about. It was after this point that I, without trying to specifically stop specific behaviors, saw a dramatic change in my life as a lot of the pain and anger that stemmed from my past went away. Additionally, many feelings of same-sex attraction had begun to develop from my senior year of high school (though I never identified as gay or bisexual) and from that point, I only experienced any real attraction for women. It was a profound change that I didn’t anticipate or seek, but it just happened.

Then, the summer after my freshman year, I had two events occur with a little over a week that radically shaped me, even though I never really came to comprehend it. One night, I was alone at my college apartment asleep. Then, at one point, I suddenly jerked up and I heard the words “Follow me.” I look back and I wasn’t quite sure if those words came from my mouth or if they were from somewhere else, as it was all such a rush. Then, a little over a week later, I was at my home with parents. It was a little after midnight, and I was upstairs and on the opposite side of my house where my parents were asleep (I didn’t know they were asleep at the time). I was walking around and I suddenly heard a voice speak “Owen” in a clear tone. Initially thinking it was my dad calling out to me, I called out “Dad.” No response. Frustrated, I walked downstairs and to the other side of the house to my parent’s bedroom, as I walked in, I discovered that my dad was sound asleep and not making any noise, besides his usual snoring.

I present this is in a more ‘objective’ manner, but when I look over the events of my life, I have a profound sense of God’s hand and guidance on my life, although it is something I don’t comprehend or understanding. On the one hand, I have often wondered if I was hallucinating and all the coincidences and happenstances of my life were just the dice randomly rolling that way in my life. And yet, there seems to be a pattern and trend to all the events that give them a greater coherence than just the luck of the draw.

But the part of me that accepted what had happened was from God, which grew more and more over the course of time, felt even more isolated and separated as a result of these experiences. I was familiar with the stories of the Bible of people having such similar events, and I am familiar with many of the parallels, but these were people of the Bible. Who was I? And why was I of all people have

Meanwhile, the only stories I ever heard of anything remotely similar disturbed me. I was a young child when I remember the story of the siege in Waco in 1993. The leader of the cult of the Branch Davidians, David Koresh had reported some sort of vision during his time in Israel, although I forget the details of it now. When I learned about that during college, I looked at everything that had happened with fear, wanting nothing to do with that life even if I felt called to be a minister. Then, I recalled a preacher who came to my college campus that berated and spoke of God’s hatred and judgment towards many people, and I recounted him feeling some sort of calling experience himself (though again, I don’t remember the details). I saw the cultish and controlling way he treated others, including how he tried to wrap me in it, and I wanted nothing to do with that sort of stuff. My experiences scared me of my calling. I wanted to make nothing of it. And yet, it was still something to it I felt. But the more I held onto it without talking about it, the more alone I felt.

I have had many experiences in the years that followed that I can only point to the leading and direction of God. There are things I don’t understand. And even now, I don’t even understand it as I approach 16 years since that summer. I am confident I wasn’t just “hallucinating” in the clinical sense and that there is something that God is doing, but I haven’t the foggiest clue. I don’t feel like I have any real special “gifts” that seems to match the “gravity” of such events, although I do recognize that I have a blend of creativity and intelligence, for whatever that is worth.

But I have hidden it because I thought in sharing, I would be even more isolated and separated than I would be in masking it. Not to mention, it is safer to keep it hidden. Plus, I never wanted to try to pull any sort of “spiritual rank” to say “you should listen to me because of what happened.” All I ever wanted after being faithful to God was to simply no longer feel alone and so different. But, life is not about what we want; I have learned that over my years of pain that it is best to accept that not everything you want will come to pass.

So, I share this with no expectations. I am not asking you to do anything or think anything of me. I am open to questions from anyone curious but do respect that I don’t want to just share anything and everything for any reason. And please, if someone happens upon this at any point in the future, please don’t think I have some great secret to give you or that I am someone who you need to treat as some vaunted authority. But if there is something you see in me, then listen to this one thing and act one accordingly to it: one of the places where I have learned to have faith and I do take great comfort in is that God enables many people by His Spirit for the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and even if I do have some rather profound and unique experiences, I am simply one of the many of the Body of Christ and I am no way in a superior or elevated position to anyone else. To that end, it is my appreciation of the giftings of the Spirit that alleviate my anxieties, even if I still feel like I am somehow way different.

And no, this is not an Aprils Fools joke. I felt lead to write about it today, for whatever reason.

If anyone of a theological background reads this that also knows me and my (chastened) appreciation for Karl Barth, I figure the title might sound shocking. But rest assured, I am not in writing this to abandon the concept of revelation in a theological sense, but rather to present a couple of  problems that comes when it comes to New Testament theology. I would summarize the two problems as follows:

Firstly, there is no singular technical term for revelation in the New Testament. There are two verbs that refer to what we might call an act of revelation: φανερόω and ἀποκαλύπτω. While these two terms are synonyms, which a comparison of Mark 4.22 and Matthew 10.26 would show, they are not exact synonyms, but function a bit differently in the contexts in which they are used.

Secondly,  revelation is often used in one of two senses: 1) a general class of events or 2) a single, all-encompassing event. However, while the usage of φανερόω and ἀποκαλύπτω is used to refer to multiple different events (contra #2), one can not draw any generalization about understanding about these events apart from the a) the God is the initiator and b) the most general epistemic sense these two terms convey (contra #1). In other words, there is no point of unification and classification all things we would call revelation, except that it emerges from God: this includes even the person of Jesus as I will attempt to demonstrate.

In regards to the first problem, I would contend that φανερόω and ἀποκαλύπτω refer to two different aspects of “revelatory” events. ἀποκαλύπτω is used in contexts where some people are let in on something that was not previously publicly accessible and known.¹ While not every use must be force fit into this exact description, at stake with ἀποκαλύπτω is the notion of privileged access as God “uncovers” it to them. On the other hand, φανερόω gets used more to describe what is actually seen and understood.²

Romans 16.25-26 is evidence of this difference, as the noun ἀποκάλυψις is used in reference to a previously non-accessible mystery, whereas φανερόω refers to what is made known in the Gentiles. Furthermore, what this passage suggests is that an act of ἀποκαλύπτω is a once-for-all event in a point of history whereas an act of φανερόω occurs repeatedly from that point onwards. That is to say, that once an “unveiling” (ἀποκαλύπτω) has been specifically made, it then becomes accessible through the testimony of the one(s) to whom it has been “unveiled.” Hence, this is why in 1 Cor 2.1-13, Paul will refer to specific teachers receiving an “unveiling” from the Spirit, but then in 14-15 speak of those who hear it, and say that those who accept it are said to be Spiritually discerning it. The “unveiling” is a non-repeatable event that then has lasting epistemic implications through testimony to others.

This is not to suggest that an action of φανερόω that is not traceable to an “unveiling” it is simply a product of testimony and the persuasiveness of the testimony. It is only to suggest that something can be “disclosed” (φανερόω) even if it is not being “unveiled.” That is to say, God can and does act to disclose something about His will and purpose, even if it is not really a secret. Thinking historically here, what can we say about Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith. I would not call it an “unveiling” as it was something contained in the Scriptures, but it was “disclosed” to Luther.³ 

I bring this up as a concept by which we can understand the possibility of revivals. It would be problematic, if not even dangerous, to suggest that revivals are somehow containing some sort of unveiling of something new. While I don’t want to exclude the possibility of God doing such a new unveiling, it would be dangerous to expect that revivals will entail such. However, I do think it is helpful to think of revivals as a fresh disclosure of what God has already unveiled. We might think of this as the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

The implications of this distinction is important in other way. For instance, many people in recent years have been pining for some sort of new Protestant Reformation, particularly as it comes to sexual mores. In their minds, we have progressed to a new understanding and God is teaching them this. Many of these people would also claim some sort of prophetic status, although not necessary for that specific reason. The problem is that from a reading of Scripture as we have it, such a view is untenable. Perhaps there is something vital that has been overlooked and ignored when it comes to matters of sex that God may re-disclose to us, but when God discloses something that is through an unveiling, the disclosure is understandable in virtue of what is already accessible but such claims of change on sex are incoherent with what we presently have.

However, we do believe such an event that has changed ethical understanding as happened in the history of God’s relationship to Israel and the world: in the person of Jesus Christ. While Jesus never nullified the Torah, with the advent of Christ and a new covenant, revelations were made to the apostle that lead to the conclusion that the Torah obedience was not necessary for the Gentiles. Something dramatic necessitated the people of God move to a new ethical understanding. However, this revelation did not occur in a vacuum, but it occurred as part of what was happening in the person of Jesus Christ; Paul refers to his own ministry to the Gentiles coming from God who was “please to unveil his Son to me.” (Galatians 2.16).

Thus such a change and move in regards to sex would need to be more than just simply a “disclosure” but an “unveiling” on a similar manner to what happened in the early Church. However, firstly, on what basis is such a revelation made? The change from the Torah was made in light of what happened in the person of Jesus. Who has come in the name of the Lord to necessitate such a change in understanding today? Or in what way has the Spirit demonstrably made Himself known that there is a clear unveiling of this new truth?

Secondly, the thing about “unveiling” is this: it is not accepted by others in virtue simply of the testimony, but there is something inherently demonstrable in what gets “unveiled.” An “unveiling” makes itself apparent to those who are able and willing to receive it. But if people outside the Christian circles are more willing to receive it whereas there is greater resistance inside the Church, this means the outside world is more open to this truth. Thus, this has been continued to be “veiled” to many Christians but not to those on the outside. While it is certainly possible, to claim that this has been “unveiled” would certainly seem to suggest leaving behind those who refuse to accept it, just as the early Christians did not seek to persuade all the Pharisees, and form a community on the basis of such a conviction if it is that absolutely necessary condition of one’s faith.

Thirdly, such an “unveiling” does not entail any prior progression or development to the idea, lest it becomes something that was accessible but overlooked, but it arrives without precedent, even if one can after the fact see it pointed to from what has already been given to know.

In other words, no sensible reading of the Bible would disclose a change in the views about sex and to promote any sort of unveiling would be to make strong claims that are deeply inconsistent with the actions taken by those advocating for such a change. While such a theological epistemology is probably not in the minds of most people advocating for a change, for those of us who take the pattern of God’s unveiling and disclosures as testified by the OT and NT seriously, such a dramatic change in the historical belief of the church would fall short of being God’s disclosure or God’s unveiling.

However, nevertheless, such a change is certainly within the purview of possibility. Why? Because we can not derive any sense of pattern about God’s unveilings and disclosures that would give us some advance knowledge and notice about specific unveilings in the future. Revelation is not a science by which we analyze past revelations to determine the shape of future revelations. They are given as is, we learn from them as they are, but we are not given a sneak-peek into further revelation in virtue of them. God’s act of unveiling does not give us the ability to unveil anything further in virtue of any disclosure already given to us. We are still left with the same epistemic dependence upon God’s actions for historically new disclosures to be made, which includes the possibility of new unveilings. However, we can look from God’s past disclosures and find some sense of understanding of future disclosures that are not conditioned upon a new unveiling, as this is taking what is already given to discover afresh more about what has been given.

So while we can accept the possibility of a new “unveiling” from God, we can not anticipate it nor specifically prepare for it in advance. The most that can be done is, like John the Baptist, to prepare the way for the Lord in repentance. But this still relies upon what has been disclosed, with a receptivity to what God can bring, but not an anticipation of the specific shape or form of what God will bring.

To summarize, the problem with revelation is that it as a concept on its own is ill-equipped for us to construct a theological epistemology for the matters of Christian life and faith that coheres with the witnesses of the New Testament. Rather, a two-fold understanding of “unveiling” and “disclosure” where the two are intrinsically related but are not phenomenologically the same thing, can allow us to insights into the nature of revivals or historically unprecedented changes in teaching and how we should approach such.

As for me, while I can accept the possibility of new unveilings I see no reason to think such has been given, but I can anxiously expect and look forward to the possibility of fresh disclosures for the Church in the West.